Cool Shit: Five of the best CBGB performances

In case you missed the last edition of Cool Shit, YouTube is an endless hole of inspiration and desperation. I would not recommending watching these all in one go because I did and I honestly thing it gave me a heart attack. It’s just an overwhelmingly painful reminder that music has not progressed (in the way that progress means discovery of something new at the very least) since the 80’s at best.

I can’t say that things were better than for sure but whatever, nostalgia is killing me and it can kill you too. These are the best five taped CBGB performances I could find although again please get in touch if you have found some hidden in some other dusty corner of the Internet.

The shining piece of this is the little bits of Richard Hell footage—I kid you not I have a semi-shrine to Hell on my night stand. To be precise, it’s two photos by Eileen Polk, one of Nick Cave the other of Hell, I have a vase of very dead flowers and this weird I don’t know, let’s call it an art piece, it’s a standing baby jesus inside a half opened egg on a pedestal that I refer to as “il bambino.” Anyways I really love Richard Hell and I did see him perform at an Ivan Julian benefit a yearish ago and it was cool to see a 60+ year old dude wither around on the floor and move around the stage on his knees. But I also would get rid of my kidney to have seen the Voidoids play just once.